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Letter: Negotiating under threat?

Editor: Mr. Boehner as Speaker for the House Republicans says the reason for the budget impasse is that President Obama will not negotiate. How can you negotiate not passing a budget or the even more serious problem of not increasing the federal debt ceiling which is coming up soon? You can’t. You either pass these bills or not. You can, prior to the vote, negotiate what is to be in the budget or the size of the increase in the debt ceiling and its duration. But what the Republicans want to negotiate are changes in the unrelated Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a Obamacare, using threats of not passing a budget and /or not raising the debt ceiling to force this issue. This is called negotiating under threat, which is usually not acceded to on the basis that it encourages such behavior in the future. It is not really negotiating but more like extortion, if I rightly understand this word.

Boehner and the rest of the rational Republicans in the House should stand up to their fanatic faction. Presumably the fanatics will be mindlessly returned to office in 2014. But likely enough Republican representatives in more contested districts will be defeated so that the they will lose their house majority. It will then be a classic case of winning a battle but losing the war and in the process causing a lot of collateral damage for the next year. Anyway it can’t go on for that long so why not resolve it now.